Titsup UK Border IT causes CHAOS at air and seaports in Blighty Queues of angry travellers were stuck at the UK border last night after a computer glitch forced immigration officers at airports and seaports to resort to manually entering passport details. The UK Border Force admitted its systems crumbled yesterday evening, causing congestion at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Birmingham …
is not limited to slow moving passport lines - its endemic of most of the British service industry. The lack of sorry is terrible and completely inexcusable, peoples fear of being blamed for stuff is part of the problem as well. Without a radical rethink of customer service it will always be the same.
You'll probably find that our general inability to inform people is governed by PR people who think any sign of apology will be tantamount to admitting liability, and thus allowing them to be sued.
However, no one would be surprised by major IT failures like this, they are bound to happen, there is nothing you as a traveller can do about, and complaining won't stop it happening again, though it might make you feel better. I can't see how Dubai would be a better place to live, I'll be they have their share of IT failures as well, tis the nature of the beast.
Immigration systems are not vital, as such, so knowing HMG, they won't have as fully invested in DR capability to the extent you might expect. They will have asked for it, when the contracts were let, but quietly dropped the requirement when Francis Maud asked for 15% of IT spend, or they realised just how much redundant secure systems cost.
You have hit the nail on the head here - immigration systems are not vital.
Having had to queue at the UK border several times in my life, I can confidently say that I have never seen anyone not get through after the officious passport checking, so if there is a line with a 2-hour wait, why not just let people through and spot-check maybe one in ten, or one in twenty passports, until the problem is fixed. After all, it's not like the mythical evil immigrants trying to sneak into the country will be queuing up at passport control. If they're trying to get in at all, they're more likely to be hiding in trucks, or coming via Ireland, where they won't get their passport checked anyway.
Like all amateur theatre, security theatre is a terrible thing.
A couple of things.
It is not endemic, many customer facing people are genuinely helpful and are a pleasure to deal with. That you only see the poor examples is more indicative about you than British society.
Border staff are not really "customer" facing, they are there to police borders not greet you with a welcome to Britain smile. They were dealing with the sh1t the best they could and would still be there hours after the blog bore had gone.
"Tourism brings in $20Bn/year, London is the most visited city in the world - you think you could afford a smile."
I've not done that job, but I suspect after sitting at a desk for hours just stamping passports and having had to deal with all sorts of smart ass remarks and planeloads of screaming chavs just back from the Costa Plonker , I don't think I'd want to smile much either.
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I've always wondered why it is that when I land in Manchester there is without fail a huge queue for a single manned border desk, until about 20 minutes later when a handful of stragglers wander up and start processing people. They know when the plane is going to land, and they know it's capacity. They know broadly how many people will be pitching up at Immigration in each terminal at any given time. Now if it was once or twice you could assume they perhaps were haring over from another terminal which had suffered a late landing and so they'd been delayed waiting for those passengers to come through before coming across.
The consistency however suggests Border Patrol staff deployments are run by the same bod who did the Olympic Games staffing rotas for G4S...
"I've always wondered why it is that when I land in Manchester there is without fail a huge queue for a single manned border desk, until about 20 minutes later when a handful of stragglers wander up and start processing people"
Its the same all over the UK. Go to a supermarket on a saturday and you can guarantee 25% of the checkouts will be closed. Why bother having them then if they're never used? And banks are even worse. I've often been in a queue where only 1 out of the 4 positions is open. Utterly hopeless.
Clearly no-one commenting here has flown into the US.
I now avoid traveling there if at all possible (working for a US company, curiously, means I travel there less!). An hour's wait for immigration is routine or even quite good - I've several times stood in line for 3 hours - and this at very major hub airports (Chicago O'Hare is particularly bad for some reason...).
I think the *only* time I went through quickly was at Minneapolis when we landed about midnight and were the last flight in that night.
The only consoling factor is that they treat US citizens just as badly as foreigners!
I don't really understand why this story is here - it could just as well have been on the BBC website or in the Daily Mail.
If I read a story about IT failure on an IT news website I expect it to actually tell us something about the IT failure rather than just the "human stories". If you don't know the tech details, leave the fluffy bunny stuff to the BBC and the tabloids! Give us a story when you can make it a tech story!
We're all here hoping that someone from the "inside" will post the truth about what's gone on. The story's just a marker for the comments to follow.
Anyway, I'd rather read "human stories" here than the Mail. I think that the Reg does a pretty good job of filtering them for me.
The insight might be that the Border Control systems are some of the oldest in the UK Governments IT infrastructure, no doubt held together by string, chewing gum and a small band of dedicated octogenarians who are dropping like flies.
It is probably one of these that fell over on the job or perhaps to provide a spark for the conspiracy theorists out there....... maybe the system was brought down by Russian or Chinese hackers....... thus letting in potential undesirables....
who knows, but it is rather comical that the guy fronting this for the Civil Serviec is called Brokenshire, BrokenArrow or something like that.....right name, right job
A computer backup is a robust system implemented to copy important mission critical data to a secondary independant medium that is engineered, designed and manufactured using chronitron particles to enable time travel. This ensures that every backup was perfectly made and checked out to be good until they are actually needed, the drive proactively fails and all backup media becomes corrupt.
Since I saw this story on an unrelated industry website I was wondering "how can the passport scanners fail, yet manually entering data still works okay". I would have thought that the scanner worked like a barcode/credit card reader and was simply used to take the information from the passport and show it on screen to then be processed however they want it to be. Are Border Control saying that their passport scanners are all linked to a separate IT system than the PCs they are sitting next to?
This looks like incredibly bad system design. Obviously the scanners were OK but they wouldn't work because some central IT system was down. You'd think they would switch to local mode and just store the data until they could be processed when the system was back up.
Resilience? What's resilience?
"Are Border Control saying that their passport scanners are all linked to a separate IT system than the PCs they are sitting next to?"
If the border control system is anything like other public sector IT setups I've come across, it'll be made up of disparate systems cobbled together with middleware and what might as well be coat hangers and cabbage, so your suspicion may well be correct.
TitterYeNot is dead on. (upvoted)
How can the scanners fail?
They fail all the time. Scanning technology seems stuck somewhere around the 1980s.
You just don't notice because they are often replaced PDQ.
Next time you go shopping, pay attention to how many scanners are not working at the different places you shop over the course of say, a month.
We're living on an increasingly faster travelled, connected planet, eventually systems that try to implement filters such as border controls will either create more chaos or have to succumb to the masses of free peoples. Either that or the only option is to close borders completely, become a hermit kingdom and kill off the demand.
Says a lot that we're still living with WW1 border controls, whereas France and Germany have an open border 60 years after WW2.
In my experience of le Shuttle, French passport control going to France consists of one flic in a portacabin smoking gauloises who gives you a friendly wave in lieu of checking your papers.
My experiences with US Passport Control made me feel like never going there again. Patronising tossers!
Thats what happens when you pay peanuts for the network, the kind of speeds that make a 56k modem look quick.
Combine that with a distinct lack of capacity and a government department so inept its laughable and hey presto, long queues and the kind of welcome that makes people go elsewhere.
But even with a 56k modem, with a decent middleware, exchanging a text string of the passport number and user details, and returning what is stored in the database along with a computer says YES or NO (or 0/1), that should still take less than a second. Maybe 3 or 4 if you are sending a vector image of the biometric data (that could be hashed on their local terminal anyway) to be compared with the central DB... You can ID a song on an EDGE network in less than 10 seconds, sending mesurements of ear, eye, nose and mouth should be childs play... then again we are talking about the guys who spent billions on an ID card system that never worked correctly. How difficult is desigining an interface that only does lots of reads and minimal writes ?
Your UK passport says: "Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance". If any UKBA employee objects to you walking past, just point this out to them ;-)
Of course, the typical 1 hour delay at border control might just be to give the baggage handlers time to unload the aircraft...
I have arrived at Stansted and been unable to get off the shuttle because the passport hall was too full, a quarter of the stands manned and a guy peering over his glasses at the disaster looking pleased.
Of course, the Americans can do all of this better than anyone else... I arrived at SeaTac with wife, kid and dog to be faced with a queue of over 6 hours for the 1 man immigration desk. When they eventually (after about 4 hours) found a second person they directed a newly arrived aircraft full right around the existing queue to him!
<Ted mode>
Got caught recently in the Frankfurt security staff strike (http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/21/us-germany-airport-idUSBREA1K0XS20140221).
As I was in transit, contrary to the lucky others, I _had_ to go through.
This was 4 hours of waiting, pushing, being pushed, all while sweating to death.
The best part was not I arrived home with 8 hours delay over a normally 10 hours trip.
The best part was the completely insane cop who almost started a riot by relocating the back of a huge queue of people competing for a _single_ open security door, next to the front of the same queue, for the same f***ing door !
See, there was not really a queue, just a front, 30 people large for the same door, all pushing, that became a front 60 people large, with half of them "cheating" the queue.
Tons of insults, in german, to the insane copper, and some agressivity between the 2 fronts.
I think I still have the meaningless answer of the head of frankfurt airport after my complain.
Frankfurt = insecure airport. Don't go there.
</Ted mode>
Landing anywhere rich in Asia, HK, Singapore, Japan etc. = courtesy, efficiency (which is a kind of courtesy I think) and technology eg. fingerprint scanners making return visitors welcome and quick to admit
Landing anywhere poor in Asia, eg. KL (the old small airport not KL Intl), etc. = chaos
Landing anywhere in USA esp. LAX = arrogance and lethargy
Landing in the UK = incompetence and apathy with broken technology
The article said Southhampton [sic] port was affected, but I arrived at Portsmouth, next door, last night at 21:30 and was through in about the same time as usual. My British passport and my wife's French passport were both scanned through and we were at the kiosk for less than a minute. I only heard about the problem in the news today. Difficult to understand why two very adjacent ports would have different immigration systems. Perhaps they meant Southampton Airport.
Each time an international flight is readied, there is a manifest that contains much of the detail collected by Immigration types around the world. These lists could be used to pre-screen passengers - just as the US does for Freedom Fighters/Criminals/Crazies.
UK Immigration already has some border agents in Bangkok (fat, ugly, loud-mouthed and pushy) who pre-screen UK bound flights. They could easily generate lists of people they have suspicions of thereby narrowing the number of interviewees upon arrival. And reducing the workload.
Better still, use PAR or AMS then take the channel train - just as quick as Heathrow.
I lived there for 8 years. 50% of the time I turned up, was straight through immigration. The other 50% I had an hour's wait. And I had a residence visa.
And no, having small airport queues doesn't make it a better place, or even more efficient than any European country. Government bureaucracy is the only thing that creates jobs for locals, who don't have the skills or the work ethic required for proper jobs. It'll normally take them a couple of months to shuffle a completely unnecessary but vital piece of paperwork around an office for the required stamps of the various people who got their jobs due to 'wasta' and only turn up for a couple of hours per day, if they feel like it. And everything you do requires copies of passport and visa in triplicate, even though they have a compulsory national ID computer system for which they take eye scans and prints of every finger and even your palms.
One could make the case that, in this situation, entering the UK would be easier if you're a bad guy.
Suppose that the manual personal details treatment is less efficient (i.e. not real-time) than the default electronic one, one just could bring the later down through a cyber-attack for this scenario to work.
I would expect this kind of scenarios to start becoming common place now. Imagine asking for any service or product where some kind of background check is performed electronical and MitM it.
So I guess this gives Britain a chance to replace some of those wonderful regimental names that were retired as the army was shrunk? "Right, right!! I served 20 years in the Dover & Heathrow Borderers, keeping Johnny Foreigner in line!" (Literally!)
I understand that IT systems go down, but if the application is so important that you would queue thousands of people per airport, maybe some additional robustness would be in order??
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